Red Beard

Akira Kurosawa's "Red Beard" begins with a man in a kimono, a short sword in his sash, walking. The camera is behind him, looking up, and his head and back fill the center of the screen. He's walking towards a cluster of wooden building that indicate we're in pre-20th century Japan. If you're a fan of Kurosawa, you've seen this shot in many of his samurai films, and the man's sword indicates that he is a member of that class, but rather than being an errant swordsman, he's a young doctor, straight out of medical school, who has been sent to do his residency at a clinic. This is a story of doctors, and of the people they take care of, shot like a widescreen, black and white, samurai epic. It's a great film.

The two central characters of the film are Dr. Yasumoto (Yuso Kayama), the character we saw at the beginning of the film, and "Red Beard", Dr. Niide (Tosiro Mifune), the director of the clinic. The central story of the film is the development of Dr. Yasumoto from a spoiled, self centered, young jerk to a compassionate and dedicated doctor, under the gruff tutelage of Red Beard.

In a previous post I compared Kurosawa and Capra. Watching this film I thought of Kurosawa and Dickens. They both managed to combine a belief in the goodness of people with a totally bleak vision of the poor's plight, suffering under a callous and corrupt social system. This vision allowed them to alternate sentimental scenes with scenes of the blackest humor. This is not an action film but there is one fight where Red Beard explains to a bunch of pimps, who are trying to prevent the two doctors from removing a 12 year old girl from a brothel, that, “You know, a bad doctor can kill you. I won’t kill you, but I might break a couple of arms or legs." You should listen to your doctor.

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen has made a film almost every year since 1977, when he made probably his best film, "Annie Hall". He was on a roll through the 70s and 80s but quality declined in the 90s and in the 00s of this century. The bureau chief, who at one time saw every Allen film that came out, adopted the wait for the reviews and see method after watching some truly wretched efforts. Expectations have been greatly diminished so it's a pleasure to be able to say that "Midnight in Paris", the director's latest, is a very enjoyable little film.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a successful screenwriter who despises his own trade. He has a sexy but horrible fiancée, Rachel McAdams, and equally horrible future inlaws, and he wishes that he could be working on his novel, in 1920s Paris, among the Lost Generation. He gets his wish, after midnight, every night. It's an English Major's wet dream where he gets to hang out with Hemingway, Scott and Zelda and Gertrude Stein. He also meets a lovely French woman, Marian Cotillard, who, a woman of the 1920s, longs for the Belle Epoque of the turn of the 20th century. Clearly this is a wry meditation on the nature of nostalgia but with a light touch.

The film is funny. The biggest crowd pleaser is Hemingway, played by unknown-to-me Cory Stoll, as a Hemingway hero speaking Hemingway prose. But Allen gets humor from all the notables who appear, to the point where just their appearing is amusing. This film, and "Vicky Christina Barcelona" demonstrate that the director still has some things to show us.

Strolling Valencia Street

It's a sunny, breezy Friday the 13th in San Francisco. The bureau chief presents some new street art. The Kool-Aid  sacred heart really makes this piece for me. Click!

Like the sign says.

I had to stick my camera through a gap in a chain link fence and hope for the best. The artist is ROA.

Opium seems like an explanation.

Good Vibrations! Vibrating since 1977.

Rats also by ROA.

San Francisco Winter/Spring

While I'm waiting to see a film worthy of posting about, I thought I'd post some shots of San Francisco. This is from the past winter. Click etc.

Spring in February.

Our city's space program.

Defending our shores.

If I'm reading the Peterson Field Guide correctly, this could be a Hooded Oriole. They winter in Mexico. Any birders out there?

Sin Nombre

"Sin Nombre" is a remarkable film. It's set in Central America and Mexico and, like when I watched "Let The Right One In", I was on the edge of my seat the whole time because I really cared about the characters and could see that things were not going to go smoothly for them. El Casper is a young member of the Tapachula, Mexico branch of the crazily violent criminal gang, Mara Salvatrucha. His girlfriend, Martha Marlene, is a middle class girl whom he tries to keep secret from the gang. Smiley is a 12 year old boy whom Casper brings into the gang. He's a larcenous innocent who acquires the homicidal callousness of a child soldier, which he functionally is. Lil' Mago, the leader of the gang, is Satan with face tattoos but not un-nuanced.

Separately, Sayra, a Honduran teenage girl, and her father and uncle are traveling north towards the United States. They come into Tapachula to hop a freight train and things go from there.

This is the first film of young American director Cary Joji Fukunaga (born in Oakland, CA) and he shot it in Spanish, mostly in Mexico, with a mix of professional and first time actors. The film received a lot of critical praise when it was released in 2009 and it deserves it. It's hard to believe it's a first film because the performances are great, the script (which Fukunaga wrote) is smart, suspenseful and even funny. Cinematographer Adriano Goldman gave the film a beautiful look. There is a lot of violence in the film but it's not gratuitous. It's part of the texture of things in the ordeal of making it, illegally, to the USA.

Two Good Memoirs

Today I changed the subtitle under the bureau's name to reflect what has turned out to be the actual subject matter of this blog. When I started posting in May 2008, I guessed at what subjects I might want to write about, wrote them down and almost never looked at them again. Glancing at the subtitle today I realized that the most neglected subject was books. I had exactly one post, a short farewell to Oakley Hall written in the first month of this bureau's existence. So I eliminated books and several other subjects from the subtitle and then, in the spirit of perversity, wrote this post about books. Here are a couple of good ones.

"Just Kids" by Patti Smith

Patti Smith is a poet of the old school. Although she's thoroughly contemporary, here's nothing Post-Modern about her, nothing in quotes. She doesn't seem to have filters against love or grief and yet she's tough and fierce (Rimbaud is her hero). This all comes through in "Just Kids", a memoir of her love affair and friendship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.  The book starts and ends with Mapplethorpe's death and in between is a portrait of the artists as young people in New York in the 70s (a decade that's starting to look better and better in the rear-view mirror). It's beautifully written and I found it a great pleasure to read. In some places she may reference a few too many names but they hung out with some really interesting people. The book is also a clear eyed but loving meditation on family. I highly recommend it.

"I Was Looking for a Street" by Charles Willeford

Charles Willeford is also a writer of an old school, but of a very different one from Patti Smith. Willeford's writing style is the literary equivalent of the dead pan. His books are full of dark humor but he never winks to let you in on the joke. He was in the U.S. military for twenty years and was a decorated tank commander during the Battle of the Bulge. He only got beyond cult status as a writer with the publication of "Miami Blues", a "detective novel", a few years before his death at 68.

"I Was Looking..." is the memoir of his childhood and early adolescence. He was raised by his grandmother after the early death of his parents. At the age of 13, in 1932, he left home so that he wouldn't be a financial burden on her. The majority of the book describes the year he spent as a bum, riding the rails in the South West states. This is the real Americana. It's a wonderful evocation of the Great Depression at a time when a system of social welfare was only starting to be constructed. You could get very close to starving to death, or freezing to death or you could get your clothes stolen while dead drunk at a Mexican brothel and have to sneak across the border naked. This book is also highly recommended.

Other Peoples' Families

Ten or more years ago, while visiting Richmond Virginia, I was taken to Whiting's Old Paper, a store that specializes in exactly what its name says. Calling it a store could conjure up the wrong vision. It's a stall in an antiques bazaar that's housed in a nondescript warehouse, on a two lane country highway, near Mechanicsville. I was fascinated by the 19th Century photos, tintypes and cartes-de-visite and the early 20th Century snapshots. The bureau chief enjoys looking at the doors of people's refrigerators to see what pictures have been chosen to be magnetically attached. This is the historical version of that.

As far as I know, none of the people in the photos were notable to anyone except their unknown friends and relations. Some images have names written on them (usually just first names) but most do not. I chose them purely because they appealed to me. I had no other method. Almost all are from the United States but I'll start with this German family featuring the world's most startled baby. Click to enlarge.

Now an American family.

A couple of young women looking pensive, melancholic, hungry?

Four guys on a tintype (lightly tinted).

Two young women on a tintype (also tinted).

Grace Reilly!

I returned to Whiting's Old Paper on my recent trip to Richmond, after not having gone there for several years. I found my interest in other people's relations had waned but I was attracted to a section of illustrations cut from books. This is an illustration from an edition of "Gulliver's Travels", most likely from the latter part of the 19th Century.